Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:04:47 -0800WeeblyFri, 05 Oct 2018 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.r2ricereview.com/blog/a-blog-post-on-blog-postsI wrote a blog post similar to this last year. I guess time didn’t really change anything.The white screen, the flashing bar, the total emptiness in my brain. What do I writeabout? What should I say? There are simultaneously so many and so few things to talkabout. I read plenty of writing, blog posts, poetry, works of fiction. How do all thesepeople come up with such deep thoughts? What is it that their brains possess that minelacks? I sometimes struggle to put together sentences, while from their pens flow anendless stream of knowledge and wisdom, commentary about social issues anddiscourses on philosophies. And from a few supremely gifted ones, even comedy andwit spring forth. I have none of that. Half the time, I can’t even put words on a page,much less wax eloquent. But maybe there’s still hope. I once read that a fiction authoronly peaks sometime in their early 50’s. I’m only 19, I guess I can only go up fromhere… right? Who knows? Maybe this self-reflective blog post is my peak. Only timewill tell. Check back in next year to see how 20-year-old me is faring. Maybe by then I’llhave a three-paragraph blogpost chock full of wisdom for you to enjoy. But until then,this is all you get, just be thankful that’s it’s not a list of quotes about fall.

​The Catcher in the Rye is a wonderful coming of age story about a young boy named HoldenCaulfield. This brilliant work of art can be classed as the Pride and Prejudice of the 50’s. In it,young Holden overcomes the egregious problems facing rich white males in the United States.For example, Holden has been raised in such a dissolute environment that he feels a strong desireto hire a prostitute. Clearly, not all of us have had to face such a difficult challenge. However,Caulfield’s innate moral compass leads him to refrain from sexual encounters; instead, hechooses to spend his time philosophizing and critiquing others who engage in less honorablepractices. Caulfield deals with the ramifications of living in a boarding school; it’s quitecomparable to similar epochal works such as Gossip Girl which also deal with the culturaldifficulties wealthy socialites face. For me, the beauty of The Catcher in the Rye is this: HoldenCaulfield physically and verbally fights others, which mirrors the metaphorical battle heundergoes to free himself from the chains of white privilege. However, The Catcher in the Rye isnot perfect. It struggles to adequately deal with family life; Caulfield’s few family interactionsare primarily with his sister. These limited insights fail to provide a full insight into the classicAmerican family, which is what I was led to expect when I picked up the book. Naturally,because it was not what I expected based off of the cover, I must penalize it slightly.Furthermore, Phoebe suffers as a character because she comes off as overbearing; also, noyounger sister would have the temerity to chastise her older sibling. Thus, the nuclear familypresented by Salinger does not accurately reflect the accepted family structure in the UnitedStates. However, The Catcher in the Rye generally matched exactly what I think life is like, allwhile speaking to me on a deeply personal level.

Final Rating: 4 ½ ★

​A satire written by Ryan C.

]]>Fri, 28 Sep 2018 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.r2ricereview.com/blog/an-interpretation-of-art-as-a-pursuit-of-intimacy You’re sitting on the bed, palms pressed against the soft, warm sheets pulled taut by your weight. Your legs dangle over the side facing him, suspended well above the ground. He’s standing, leaning really, against his desk, one arm pressing down on it, the other crossed over his chest as he stares at you. You’re speaking. You’re explaining your tension, your struggles, your pain, and your dreams to him. They tumble out of your mouth, words flowing after one another like a waterfall, cascading down the side of your bed. He’s picking through them. He’s inspecting each one, sorting them, and storing them. At least, you think he is. But you see it in his stare, his distant, glassy stare. You see that they are just sounds to him. The fear, the joy, the essence of yourself woven into your words dissipates the second they leave your mouth, and as he scoops them up he does so without comprehension, without understanding. You pause. He nods. The silence stretches. He has nothing to say. He is thinking, but you know there is no sense in waiting. You wait anyway. Inevitably he breaks the silence, and the platitudes and miscomprehension drip out of him, clattering against the floor with the hollow, metallic clinking of rusty nails. They hurt.

The sky is dark, shrouded in the thick blackness of night. She’s staring up at it as she speaks. Her words are like the pitter-patter of rain striking a window, tarrying for but a moment before they slide down and off into the darkness. Her eyes are rimmed with redness, and the little cracks in her voice are jagged and uneven. She’s staring up into the sky as she speaks, and the words flowing out of her mouth are obscured by the darkness. She’s staring up into the sky as she speaks, and not at you. And all the little cues - the quavering voice, the moist eyes, the slight trembling – all of them speak of pain, but she won’t look at you. And you can feel it in your eyes. You can feel the distance and the void, the irreconcilability of her world with yours. You can feel what she might be avoiding etching itself in your pupils. You turn to your right, and you see suffering. She looks straight ahead. Her pain will never be yours.

We are all as islands unto one another. Separated by vast stretches of experience, our inner lives are remote and trapped within ourselves. We search unceasingly for intimacy - with our friends, with our lovers, with our parents - with anyone we think might understand us. We are never successful. Despite our best efforts to explain ourselves and understand others, despite how well we sometimes believe we are understood or how well we sometimes believe we understand others, there is never true understanding. Each one of us has a distinct set of experiences, a distinct set of impressions, a distinct set of struggles and pains. We cannot expect ourselves to be able to step outside of those, to be able to fully step into another person’s life as easily as we might step into a pair of shoes. We are confined by what we know and who we are. Even as we empathize with others, we fail to fully understand them. The goal of the writer or the artist is to break beyond this. The desire to be understood pushes us to understand ourselves and synthesize our experience into a story or a feeling we can share. We struggle to encapsulate our full experience in what we create, and if we share that work we are casting a part of ourselves out into the world to be seen and understood. Alas, it a doomed enterprise. Even when we write and create, when we pull from ourselves all that we are able, we can never fully bridge the barriers inherent in human individuality. If you consider, for example, the first story, can you fully describe the “hurt”? To each reader it would be felt as a different sensation linked to different memories, and so even amongst fellow readers the experience would not be the same. The actions of the artist, then, are like hurling a stone into the ocean. The true form of it sinks beneath the waves, lost somewhere on the ocean floor, and in its wake it leaves ripples. This slight disturbance in the water, this slight nudge to the lives and minds of others in the world – this is what the painter, what the composer, what the author creates beyond their work. It is a slight perturbation of the world. It is a distorted piece of the creator pulsing out from their creation, diminishing almost to nothing as it propagates, but it is something nonetheless. This is what we hold onto when we write, when we paint, when we push our souls into our work and our work into the world. This slight taste of something - this slight sensation of having some dilute, distorted perception of our inner lives exist in others– this is our candle in the night. This is our paltry effort to stave off the darkness of our isolation, and though it is a small comfort, it is a comfort nonetheless.

I had an interesting experience at the symphony last weekend. The pianist was amazing, and for the first thirty minutes I was completely engrossed in his playing. And then my mind started to drift. Suddenly, I was writing a poem in my head while the concert was going on. Part of me felt guilty about it, like I should really be completely focused on the music. But it was pretty cool, too. While the musicians were making their art, I was simultaneously making mine. When I got home, I wrote down what I’d come up with, and it turned out wilder and stranger than what I’ve been writing lately.

I took two things away from that evening. First, the best writing doesn’t always start on the page. You can write while you listen to a concert, clean your room, or walk your dog. And secondly, at the symphony I was forced to sit down for two hours and just be there. There were no distractions, no one texting me, no homework to do. That kind of experience has been rare since I started college. Freshman year, I was shocked at how hard it was for me to write, and I wrote three times as many poems last summer (when I didn’t have a job and was extremely bored) than I did in my entire first year.

We’re all busy at Rice. But writers need time to rest—even to be bored. If every free moment of your day is filled with events, classes, friends, homework, Netflix, and napping, you have left your brain no time to cook anything, no time to synthesize and combine your experiences into that magic creative impulse that leads to art.

So here are six simple practices to give yourself some blank space to generate the beautiful poems, stories, and essays you have inside you.​1. Make a playlist that inspires you and listen to it for half an hour before you start writing. Really sink into the music. Close your eyes and feel the stories the songs are telling. (PS, the album To the Sun and All the Cities in Between by City of the Sun is some of the most evocative instrumental music I’ve ever heard. If you’re looking to start your writing playlist, give ‘em a listen!)

2. Go to a free event you think might be slightly boring—maybe a lecture on the physics of Star Trek or a silent movie screening. If it’s interesting, it could generate material for your writing. If not, you can zone in and out and think about whatever you want. The important part is that you’ll be in a space where politeness will restrict you from chatting, using your phone, or falling asleep, a perfect atmosphere for writing.

3. But also, sleep. I sometimes come up with ideas for writing in dreams. For bonus points, wake up half an hour earlier than you need to and use that time to jot down a few ideas/images/ephemera.

These are just a few ideas. I’m sure y’all can come up with even better practices that work for you! Best of luck, and happy writing.

Written by Annabelle C.]]>Sat, 22 Sep 2018 19:33:45 GMThttp://www.r2ricereview.com/blog/a-friendly-neighborhood-treeLook up, and you shall see a tree. A tree much like you. You walk away from your third exam of the week; you see a tree as exhausted as yourself, with its long torso slouched against the grass, leafy fingers outstretched, toward the frequented pathway outside McMurtry and students passing by. You fall off your skateboard on your way to class; you see a tree bark—scraped yet tough. You feel a great explosion of enthusiasm and validation; you see a tree: proud-faced, arms thrown up in a Y, ecstatic and free of worries. You want a break from your hectic schedule; you see a tree, in the middle of everything, but serene, a head of broccoli, under which you are tempted to sit down and slumber away into oblivion.

At night, I walk under their gnarly fingers, a tunnel made for me. It is nine p.m., you look up and see a roof of curly bones; you look down and see images cracked into the ground. Shadows leap from the lights cast from the lampposts—a growing claw besides me, dragging zombies up ahead, a bestial blob in front. A host of frightening yet curious figures. A strange feeling settles in me; and I slow down and observe. A knot, a branch, a cluster of diamond-shaped leaves. Up, up, up, up. It is a climb, one that brings you beyond the shadows and the fears and the narrow-mindedness. A wide, pitch-black void, night. What we find there is that precious thing that Plato calls Truth.

There are as many trees as there are students. Or at least, that’s what I think as I walk around Rice campus. All of the trees in Houston congregate here, offering us oxygen for our carbon dioxide. Mutualistic exchange, or something more. While some of them may seem odd or intimidating, they each have as much character as us, a permanent resident and companion. So—

Look up, and you shall see a friend.

Written by Kristie L. ]]>Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:42:41 GMThttp://www.r2ricereview.com/blog/contextsThink about your favorite poem. If you don’t have one, think about your favorite book, movie, song, TV show, art piece, whatever. Where did you find it? Who were you, then? Did you pick your favorite book off a library shelf and take it home with you? Did you read it all in one go on the floor at a bookstore? Did you hear your favorite song at a party, in the background of a TV show, or did you download it before listening to it because you knew it was by your favorite artist? Do you have a picture of your favorite art piece saved on your phone? Is it your lock screen? Is it better in person?

I went to an English Undergraduate Association event where we made stickers out of cut-outs from old books and art magazines. I picked up a vintage (2008) edition of R2 and, as I flipped through it, was struck by two things: (1) the magazine had no visual art component, and (2) there was a poem, titled “V. Credits,” about end credits, at the very end of the magazine, right before the contributor biographies. I was so struck by how perfect the poem was, and how perfect the placement was (I thought at first that they were literal “end credits” to the magazine) that I almost got emotional over it, so I cut it out of the magazine to make a sticker out of it.

It was only after I cut it out that I realized what a horrible, violent act I had performed--attacking this artifact of Rice history, slicing this poem out of its home, ditching the page number, the author’s name, cutting off the arteries that had once fed life into the poem. While I’m sure that other, intact copies of the 2008 edition of R2 exist somewhere else in the world, this copy will never be the same again, and this poem will never know its home again. I was almost compelled to glue it back into the magazine.

I didn’t, but hopefully I can resurrect this poem and give it a new home here. I was moved by it in the magazine; who says that someone else may not be moved by it in the blog?

Walking around the Tokyo National Museum gallery this summer, I saw this scroll of poems with words that looked more like chicken-scratch than actual Japanese. Originally I took this photo because I intended to ask my host family whether or not they could read it.

For those who are unfamiliar with Japanese, it looks like this:

*Hiragana is used for Japanese words and Katakana is used for foreign words (and some miscellaneous usages such as for onomatopoeias)

With my limited knowledge of the language, I could make out a few characters,

but as for the rest, all I saw were scribbles.

Before I ever got around to asking my host family, I met a Japanese student who had studied Japanese calligraphy for nearly a decade during her childhood. So naturally I showed her the picture I had taken and asked her what she thought. “This is very beautiful calligraphy,” my new friend said, “The balance is very good.”

When I told her I didn’t quite get what she meant by “good balance,” she explained that,1. The lines went straight up and down and did not curve or slant 2. The connection of letters within individual words was smooth3. The spaces between letters were all even, including the spacing of the connectedletters.

The “fluid” look actually required years of training to master. My friend said she would practice writing individual words over and over again until her teacher approved.

But what I found most interesting was that the writing on the scroll was poetry. I still don’t know what it says, as my friend said the Japanese was too old for her to understand, but I imagine the reading of the poem flows just as smoothly as its lettering: a wonderful fusion of visual and written art. From past experience, I don’t remember the last time I saw a poem in which the visual components (besides the spacing) were taken into as much consideration as the poem itself. And I’m sure many writers don’t give a second thought to whether their writing is printed in Times New Roman or Arial.

That led me to wonder what would happen if we also developed specific English lettering systems to write certain poems. Would it change the way we read them?​(Note: the purple/blue spots on the scroll are part of a “flying cloud” decorative pattern.)

R2: The Rice Review is honored to be part of The Creative Process, an exhibition and international educational initiative traveling to leading universities. As part of the exhibition, portraits and interviews with writers and creative thinkers are being published across a network of university and international literary magazines. The Creative Process is including work by faculty and students of Rice University in the projection elements of the traveling exhibition.

*

This interview was completed by Mia Funk.

Novelist and short-story writer Yiyun Li discusses her two homelands – the China she left when she came to the University of Iowa to study immunology, and America, which has been her home for almost 20 years. In novels like Kinder than Solitude and The Vagrants, and short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, she has impressed critics and fellow writers with the grace and subtlety of her writing, even as she tells stories so truthful and critical that she won’t publish her books in China. Michel Faber, writing for The Guardian, said, “Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life’s insoluble mysteries...[she] is the real deal.”

Li has received numerous awards, including Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, among others. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She has served on the jury panel for Man Booker International Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, and other. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space.

In the US, she discovered her love for literature and studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop with Marilynne Robinson, whom she credits for teaching her to read deeply, but the writers which Li says have been a deeper influence on her are William Trevor, Elisabeth Bowen, Tolstoy, and Turgenev

I met Li in Paris during the Festival des Écrivains du Mondeand reconnected a few months later for this phone interview.

*

YIYUN LISomeone asked me why does Kinder Than Solitude start with a death? And I always think, death is not the end of the story. Death is always the starting point of the story. Death is such a—well, there’s no private death. You know, if you think about someone, in the newspaper someone died yesterday—in New York, she was murdered, that went really public. But even when a very unknown person dies all of a sudden, I think it’s no longer private: people would come to the memorial service, people would talk about the person. I think that really death moves people beyond their control of themselves. So I think for that reason, I like to think about death as the detail of a bigger story that no longer belongs to that person.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSIt’s like an unraveling. So you see how did that person become unraveled, and all the threads that brought them there.

LIYes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSSo for a while, you were an involuntary soldier in the Chinese army?[1]

LIFor about a year, yes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSSo, what was that experience like? How did you draw on that for your writing later?

LII think, in retrospect, I really appreciate it. And partly because I went there when I was 18, and I came out when I was 19, and that was the time you started to develop your whole, I guess, life philosophy and your view of the world. And I went in, when we talked about anger earlier, I was much angrier than when I came out of that service. Partly, I felt that I was– I went in with this– you know young people... I went in with this urge to become someone, to have like a big personality. To become—to have character. But I realized—it’s really boringafter a year—I realized I could become a personality, and I was a personality, and I was a character. And it was rather disappointing. And again the moment you put yourself in that situation, a lot of things are black and white. The army is bad, the people who oppress us, it's the army—they're bad. Then it's not true, everybody is so complicated. So I came out, and I think the moment I left the army, I knew that I could never judge anyone and I became really ambivalent about a lot of things.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSYes, exactly, the army forces you into false positions. And fiction is like the opposite of that. It’s all the shades of gray.

LIYes, that was when I was, even before elementary school. So probably when I was 5.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSWow, that’s quite extreme.

LIYes, it’s interesting. I didn’t really feel anything weird. As children, everything comes to you very naturally because you just remember these moments without understanding them. And only when you’re a grown-up you look back you realize there’s more to that understanding.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSSo was The Vagrants sort of your way of making sense of that, and then the wider story of what happened in that time?

LIYes, I think so. And I felt it has the setting of 1978-79 which sort of overlapped with my views and my confusion and in a way, I think writing is always a way to sort out your confusion.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSYes, because you were saying, you were taught never to put your thoughts into words, and that must have come out of the cultural revolution. Do you think your writing is part of—you were formed by the cultural revolution in a way?

LIWell, certainly my decision not to write in Chinese is formed by that, I think. Not to put your thoughts into words is a lifelong issue. My parents and they would teach us these things, and so you learn early on these things are not– you’re not supposed to do these things, and I think for me– it’s interesting because as I look back, I think maybe I didn’t have any thoughts because when I was told not to put thoughts into words, maybe I just didn’t have the words for my thoughts. Maybe I only started to really think hard when I started to think in English. So in that sense, maybe I think English is not my second language, but both are my first language. So I would say yes, I think the long detour to writing was partly formed by the cultural revolution.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSAnd I can imagine how frustrating, as someone who is a potential writer and is curious about people to have people hiding their thoughts and not saying. I mean, there is almost like a constant mystery to try to figure out what’s really being thought, and what’s really going on. Did you find you were like that, as a kid? Very curious, asking lots of questions?

LII was really curious and never asked questions because you also learned quickly not to ask questions. I mean that is very Chinese. When you were young, you were not as confident as you wanted to be so whatever you wanted to know people really did not care about those things. So I didn’t ask questions, but I was very curious. I offended people when I was really young because I was so curious I would stare at them, just for a long time.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSMe too. I did that kind of stuff.

LII know, isn’t that fun, to stare at people. People would really be offended, and they would say very mean things because we were staring at them, so I was curious, yes. And that’s the part where nobody really explained the world to me.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSIt’s nice to have wonder. It’s really unfortunate, that’s sort of the thing about growing up. You’re supposed to learn not to do these things, not to step on people’s personal space, but the wonder of the child–and I think that’s what all kinds of writers, all kinds of artists, have–this wonder, this curiosity. It’s fortunate for their career that they can keep that alive. It keeps you young, in effect. So, of all the characters you’ve written, who is the closest to your own personality, would you say?

LIThat’s a very difficult question. All my characters…I would say the narrator in Kindness, the novella. I think she probably is close to me in many ways. Not my story, but she speaks in a voice that is close to my voice.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSShe also has your reading habits.

LIShe does, certainly, she does. She loves a lot of writers I do as well. And then I think also with The Vagrants—people ask about that too—with The VagrantsI felt when I was writing it, I felt very close to Teacher Gu, the old man. I sort of felt I lived with all the characters in that novel. But I lived the novel through him more than anybody else. He’s close to me. And then with Kinder than Solitude, it’s very interesting. It’s so difficult, I felt—I still feel very close to Aunt, the mother.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSI thought about the silence too, her quietness.

LII mean certainly I am mystified by her and joined to her, but I also feel very close to her. And I asked my best friend, and she likes her too, which is very reassuring.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSI don’t know if you want me to say–because it’s a bit of a spoiler to say that–but I don’t consider her a real murderer. It’s complicated.

LIIt is. Someone asked me if she did intend to murder. I don’t think she even knows herself. She just half-heartedly does things, and when you talk of the consequences, it’s interesting because for her she views the world a little differently from us. When I say from us, I mean from everyday people. But she actually did not think about the consequences and, I don’t know, she’s just not concerned with consequences, which is fascinating to me.

THE CREATIVE PROCESSIt's like she looks at her actions from the perspective of a long time–how do you say–it's like a leader views things that happen that are incidental. Like a death as opposed to the big scheme, the big story.

LIYes, I know, when you think of the way she looks at herself, I always imagine, like you turn the telescope the wrong way, and you put your hand in front of the telescope, and your hand becomes further away? And it’s really far and small and boring? And I think the whole life she has lived is that way. Like this reverse telescope, and she can look at her life, and somehow she can say, “That life is so far from me,” but I think there are just only a few moments in that novel where she says, “Well, that’s me.” Most of the time she says, “That’s someone. That someone is interesting.”

How Can I Participate?There are many ways to become involved. If you’re interested in sharing your views on creativity and the humanities, we would love to hear from you. Involvement ranges from interviews, podcasts, short films or engagement with other art/educational initiatives.

“There is a clear-cut: old life, that's old country,and here's there's new life, new country. It is an advantage. You are looking at life through an old pair of eyes and a new pair of eyes. And there's always that ambivalence––Where do you belong? And how do you belong? And I do think these are advantages of immigrant writers or writers with two languages or who have two worlds.”–YIYUN LI

I liked the image suggested by Li’s description of looking at life through an old and a new pair of eyes. Her writing is characterized by subtlety and characters who do not always directly express their emotions. Often their true feelings, motives, actions are submerged, and so I thought it would be interesting to show Li with her eyes closed, with her face reflected in the water.

Li told me about her admiration for Patricia Highsmith’s stories, which she calls “masterful because nothing happens. Really, nothing happens and you feel the danger, the threatening that something is going to happen, like a death or something, but really nothing happens. And I think that touch, it’s the same touch. It’s to allude the reader rather than to impose something on you.”

Things happen in Li’s books, of course, but her writing also has an alluding touch. And so I thought it would be more interesting for the figure on top to have her eyes closed. I saw her as a kind of iceberg in warm waters. Writers often say that they feel most alive when they are writing, effectively, when they are dreaming, so for me, it made sense for the face of Li above the water to have her eyes closed.

Now that she has lived over 20 years in America, the majority of her adult life, she told me she’s “on the cusp of becoming an outsider, and on the cusp of becoming a foreigner in China. I know the language, I can decipher people’s facial expressions which, all of those things are super helpful. So you’re both inside and outside at the same time.”

So these were some of the sources I drew on when I was doing her double portrait, as well as her books A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and Kinder than Solitude.

]]>Thu, 12 Apr 2018 15:06:06 GMThttp://www.r2ricereview.com/blog/april-12th-2018We’re coming up on finals season now and with all those essays and problem sets, it can be hard to gather up the energy to read something for fun. But if you’re still hankering for something literary, worry not: Netflix has been outdoing itself with a steady stream of high-quality book adaptations that are sure to take your mind off GenChem, senior design, or Orgo. Want all A’s? Look no further, because I’m sure one of these is sure to fit the bill.

1. A Series of Unfortunate Events

If these strangely pessimistic, uniquely verbose, darkly comical books weren’t a part of your childhood, you’re still in good time to become a fan of Lemony Snicket and the Baudelaire children with the brilliant Netflix adaptation that is now in its second season. Originally thirteen books, each one is split into two hour-long episodes that perfectly capture Snicket’s sharp wit and cynicism as they narrate the tragic story of precocious orphans Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. This adaptation includes details of the intricate plot that previous adaptation have glossed over and perfectly captures the steampunk gloom of the original books. Featuring a star-studded cast with big names such as Neil Patrick Harris as antagonist Count Olaf and Patrick Warburton as Lemony Snicket, this show is sure to ruin your day in the best way.

2. Annihilation

Based on the strange science fiction novel by Jeff VanderMeer, this movie starring Natalie Portman is a slow-budding, aesthetically beautiful work that leaves you strangely satisfied, even if it does raise more questions than answers. Centred around an all-female group of scientists that ventures into a The Shimmer, a wildland from where no previous research time has returned, Annihilation is filled with shifting landscapes, vivid colors, and strange creatures. Although the film deviates quite significantly from the novel, its great cast, soothing soundtrack, and amazing visuals make it a more than worthwhile watch.

​3. Alias Grace

This Canadian-American adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel of the same name is, in my humble opinion, the only one of these three titles that by far surpasses the original literary version. Centered around accused murderess Grace Marks, the Netflix miniseries organizes the confused and rather underdeveloped narrative from the novel into a coherent, riveting narrative that leaves you on the edge of your seat. Combined with a stellar cast and well-executed plot twists, this is a nice and easily bingeable series perfect for fans of The Handmaid’s Tale, period dramas, or psychological murder mysteries.That’s all for now, folks. Happy finals!

​Written by Mariana N.

]]>Mon, 09 Apr 2018 23:00:00 GMThttp://www.r2ricereview.com/blog/year-1-in-reviewAs Owl Days approaches us in the last two weeks of classes, I’m looking forward to speaking to prospective students and parents about why they should choose Rice. I like talking to prospies because they make me feel like an expert on Rice, even though I still need to use Google Maps to find my way from the stadium to the north colleges. Talking to prospies also allows me to reflect on the person I’ve become since coming to Rice, how I’ve grown and developed, what new opportunities I’ve had, et cetera. For example, this is the person I was when I visited for Owl Days:

“I’m at Rice. My host has a freaking rooftop suite with a view of downtown, like, come on! I wish I just went to this school. All these events are tons of fun, but it’s such a chore to have to text my host every time I want to get in and out of a room. I wish I just went here already and was just like a regular student. Like, let’s do it, you know, let’s get this thing going.”

And this is the person that I’ve grown to become in two semesters here:

No, but really. I’m so grateful for all of the opportunities I’ve had here that I don’t think I could have had anywhere else. I have met so many wonderful people over the course of nine months that I can’t imagine my life without, I’ve taken so many cool classes and had a ton of exciting experiences, I’ve learned so many lessons about independence and self-reliance, and I’ve come away from this year knowing that other people have read my writing on the R2 blog, which has been a dream and goal of mine probably since I was in elementary school. (Well, I didn’t know about the R2 blog when I was in elementary school, but you know what I mean.) My only regrets are that, like I said a year ago, I couldn’t choose Rice earlier, and that I took 24 credit hours in high school that will never transfer.